It was supposed to be a Desert Island Discs-style interview. I was to try to find out what the real George Osborne was like: how was he brought up? What were the early influences on him? Why did he go into politics? In a packed function room of a Bournemouth hotel, I started by asking about his parents and siblings. He talked of his left-leaning mother, who worked for Amnesty, the family’s metropolitan values, the gay interior designers he met through his father’s wallpaper business. And then he mentioned his three brothers.

“What did they tease you about?” I asked, thinking the answer might be revealing.

He hesitated for a moment. “Should I tell you this?” he wondered. “They used to call me ‘Knowledge’ because I knew every fact there was to know about dinosaurs and planets and things like that.”

You instantly know the type. Facts, facts, facts; the sort of boy who pores over Wisden and learns every cricketing statistic off by heart.

“Faintly autistic?” I asked, with a laugh. After all, men tend to be farther along the autistic spectrum than women, and obsession with facts is one of the first indicators. But I didn’t mean it at all seriously.

Nor did Mr Osborne intend his reply to be taken seriously. He laughed, too, and said: “We’re not getting into Gordon Brown, yet.” Nobody in the room took it as more than a joke, albeit a slightly tasteless one.

I thought no more about it. I knew that the columnist Robert Harris had already suggested in print that Mr Brown was a tad autistic, and it is an epithet that plenty of politicians and journalists have used lightly about the Chancellor. He does, after all, have an obsessive personality and rather low emotional intelligence. That is why the audience laughed: Mr Osborne’s joke resonated with them.

Mr Osborne is a genuinely funny politician with a quick wit, who cannot resist making a joke if it pops into his head.

We British love black humour — look at the success of Little Britain. But it seems that we have double standards for politicians. If Mr Osborne now feels that he has to curb his tongue, politics will become duller still.

Times Recommends

• The bright side of this winter rain
• Story behind the picture: Snow Leopard, 2008
• Times Charity Appeal: The Place2Be